


Misunderstood

by imaginationisrainbowcoloured



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Didn't Know They Were Dating, Getting Together, Idiots in Love, M/M, Minor David Jacobs/Jack Kelly, Miscommunication, Misunderstandings, Modern Era, Past Child Abuse, Spot Conlon/Racetrack Higgins-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27023821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginationisrainbowcoloured/pseuds/imaginationisrainbowcoloured
Summary: “Race, c’mon.” Jack called, “I don’t have time to stand outside here and yell at you until you come out, but I will.”There was a muffled response from the other side of the door, which Jack chose to interpret as an affirmative, but was more likely a repetition of the ‘fuck off’- the only thing he had heard from Race since he had locked himself in the bathroom. He still didn’t know why.Race had come home almost half an hour ago, slammed the front door and locked himself in the bathroom. Jack, who had stuck his head out of the kitchen at the door slam had just had enough time to watch Race borderline sprint to the bathroom and lock the door. He had been in their since, had only started responding to Jack after twenty minutes, and Jack was pretty certain he had been crying.“Race please.”“Fuck off, Jack!” Yeah, definitely crying, Jack could hear the crack in his voice.(I promise it's not as angsty as this sounds)
Relationships: (mentioned) - Relationship, David Jacobs/Jack Kelly, Spot Conlon/Racetrack Higgins
Comments: 2
Kudos: 85





	Misunderstood

“Race, c’mon.” Jack called, “I don’t have time to stand outside here and yell at you until you come out, but I will.”

  
There was a muffled response from the other side of the door, which Jack chose to interpret as an affirmative, but was more likely a repetition of the ‘fuck off’- the only thing he had heard from Race since he had locked himself in the bathroom. He still didn’t know why.

  
Race had come home almost half an hour ago, slammed the front door and locked himself in the bathroom. Jack, who had stuck his head out of the kitchen at the door slam had just had enough time to watch Race borderline sprint to the bathroom and lock the door. He had been in their since, had only started responding to Jack after twenty minutes, and Jack was pretty certain he had been crying.

  
“Race please.”

  
“Fuck off, Jack!” Yeah, definitely crying, Jack could hear the crack in his voice.

  
He sighed and slid down the wall until he was sitting in their tiny corridor opposite the bathroom door. “I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  
“Who said I want your help?” Race retorted.

  
That, Jack decided, was progress. It was something out of him other than ‘fuck off’ and it was also kind of an acknowledgement that something was wrong.

  
“Alright, how about Davey’s help?”

  
Race didn’t respond to that, choosing instead to throw something at his side of the door- or that was what Jack assumed he did, considering all he heard was a thump and he couldn’t actually see Race. Either way, he took it as an affirmative.

  
_**Cowboy** : hey can u come over smthns up w race_

  
_**DaveyBaby** : Yeah, of course, do you know what it is?_

  
_**Cowboy** : nope hes looked himself in the bathroom & wont say anyth or come out_

  
_**DaveyBaby** : I’m on my way, I’ll be about ten minutes_

  
_**Cowboy** : thanks._

  
Davey didn’t respond, and Jack took that to mean that he had put his phone away in order to drive. Ten minutes- he could deal with ten minutes of unresponsive Race; he’d been dealing with Race since they both moved in to Medda’s nearly eight years ago.

  
“Are you gonna talk to me yet?”

  
“Fuck off, Jack.”

  
Apparently not.

  
*

  
Davey arrived exactly ten minutes later, as expected because he never drove over the speed limit, no matter the emergency (‘I won’t be able to help in an emergency if I’ve been pulled over by the police, Jack!’) and he always perfectly calculated the amount of time it would take him to drive said speed limit. The only indicator that Davey was as worried about this as he was, was the fact that he opened the front door and let himself in, rather than knocking and waiting for Jack.

  
“Where is he?”

  
Jack waved his hand listlessly at the door, “Still in there.”

  
“Alright,” he raised his voice slightly, “Race?”

  
A pause. A thump. “What?”

  
“Are you gonna come out?”

  
“No.”

  
Any other time, Race would have jumped at the opportunity to make a joke about being gay and coming out, but instead of throwing out the ‘I’m gay’- even miserably- he didn’t make it at all. Jack watched as the crease in Davey’s brow deepened.

  
“How long has he been in there?”

  
“About forty minutes now.”

  
He nodded, and Jack could almost see him breaking down the problem in his head, “Race?”

  
“What?”

  
“Have you eaten today?”

  
There was a small, broken sob and Davey’s eyes widened, panicked.

  
“Yeah,” Race said, “I ate.”

  
The two of them exchanged a confused glance,

  
Davey turned back to the door. “Uh, have you got a drink?”

  
There was a quiet sniff that they only picked up on because they were listening out for any more sobs, “No.”

  
“Will you open the door enough to take a water bottle?” 

  
Jack resisted the urge to roll his eyes at Davey’s unconscious mothering.

  
“Yeah,” Race sighed, “I guess.”

  
Davey smiled, looking slightly relieved, “Thank you. I’ve got one here.”

  
A hand stuck itself out of the crack that appeared, and Davey placed a water bottle- that he had apparently just brought with him in his satchel? - in it. The hand disappeared quite quickly after that and there was the sound of Race re-locking the door. Jack looked up at Davey.

  
“What now?” he mouthed

  
Davey held up a hand- the universal sign for ‘hold on’- “Race? We’re gonna go into the kitchen now. Shout or come out if you need anything, ok?”

  
“Yeah.”

  
Davey nodded and bit his lip, the worried look was back in his eyes and Jack wasn’t feeling any better than he had been ten minutes ago, the only positive he could see was that he- the most emotionally stilted person he knew- was not dealing with this alone. Carefully, the two of them moved into the kitchen. “Where was he?” Davey asked quietly, glancing back at the corridor before looking Jack straight in the eyes.

  
“I don’t know,” Jack replied, keeping his voice to the same volume, “he said he was going out, I asked him if he was meeting someone and he said yeah and then left so…”

  
“You don’t know who he met?”

  
Jack shook his head apologetically.

  
“Ok, ok. Let’s go down the list.”

  
“Huh?”

  
“Our friends. You know, people he could have been with.” 

  
“Right, ok, go ahead.”

  
Davey nodded and pulled out a pen, “Paper?” 

  
When Jack finally found a blank piece of paper, Davey spilt it into two columns- ‘Not’ and ‘Possible’. Down the ‘Not’ column, he wrote ‘Davey, Jack, Sarah, Katherine, Albert.’

  
“Albert?”

  
“Sarah was helping him with his math class.”

  
“Ah, ok.” Jack took the pen and added to the column, ‘Elmer, Smalls, Sniper, Crutchie’

  
“Were they with you?”

  
“Yeah. Except Crutchie, he was at Medda’s today.”

  
“Alright, and now the possible column.”

  
Together they managed to collect the rest of their friends’ names in the other column- ‘Tommy, Mike, Ike, Blink, Mush, Spot, Finch, Henry, JoJo, Buttons, Specs, Romeo.’

  
“That’s a much longer list.” Jack pointed out, unhelpfully, “What are we gonna do, text everyone and ask if they were with Racer?”

  
“Unless you have any other ideas, yeah.”

  
“I’ll take the top six then.”

  
Davey nodded reluctantly- it wasn’t the best way they could do this, and it was a little bit of an invasion of Race’s privacy, but Race never cried and he wasn’t offering anything they could do- so they both sat down, ready to text a bunch of their friends and offer no explanation for their question. As people slowly responded, they crossed names off the list. Ten minutes later, Race emerged from the bathroom, just as they had got it down to the twins and Spot.

  
“What are you guys doing?” he asked quietly, a massive difference from Race’s normal demeanour.

  
“Trying to work out who you were with.” Davey told him, oblivious to Jack wincing at his honesty, thinking that Race wasn’t going to be happy about that, “Because it might help us work out how to help you.”

  
“Oh.” Race responded, listless and emotionless, “Who do you have?”

  
“The twins, Mike and Ike.” Davey watched Race for a reaction, “And Spot.” The reaction to that was immediate, Race’s face crumpled, and he curled his knees up to his chest.

  
“Spot, then.” Jack muttered, and then louder, “Ok, what did he do and how much should I hurt him?”

  
“Please don’t hurt him,” Race whispered, barely audible through where his face was buried into his knees, “I think I love him.”

  
There was a long pause and Davey and Jack exchanged a bemused glance, “Ok,” Jack finally said, “I’m gonna need an explanation on that one.”

  
Race sat up again and rubbed his sleeves over his eyes, “I thought we were dating, we go out every week and we hooked up at Jack’s last party, so I thought we were dating, but apparently not because he asked me who I was dating, which must have been his way of trying to let me down gently, but I thought we had something and-“ he broke off with another sob.

  
Jack was choking slightly, “You had sex?” he demanded, “With Spot Conlon?”

  
“Yeah, and we kept dating after that, but apparently we weren’t.” Race managed to get out between sobs. Davey stood up and went to get a glass of water,  
“Calm down, drink this and calm down, we can’t do anything while you’re like this.”

  
Race nodded, accepting the water, and breathing deeply after ever sip, the other two watched him until he had finished the glass and seemed a lot calmer.

  
“Ok,” Davey sighed, “I think I know what happened.”

  
The other two looked at him, Race with raised eyebrows that quite obviously asked him to go on.

  
“Ok,” Davey started, “so, before you had sex- “

  
“Please just say hooked up,” Jack interrupted.

  
“Before that happened,” he continued, shooting an irritated glance in Jack’s direction, “the two of you were already going out for meals together, spending time together- doing what you classed as going on dates?”

  
Race hesitated, obviously unsure of where Davey was going, “Yes?”

  
“Alright,” he nodded like this made sense, “and then you… ‘hooked up’ and neither of you spoke about it, you didn’t acknowledge it at all.”

  
“Well, you know Spot, he doesn’t like to talk about things.”

  
“And then you continued to go on what you classed as dates?”

  
Davey could see some of the clarity he had dawning in Jack’s eyes, unfortunately Race still looked confused, and it was Race he was trying to explain the situation to.

  
“Yeah, Mouth I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

  
“Did Spot know they were dates?”

  
“Uh…” the horrified realisation was finally rising across Race’s face like the sun across the ocean, “I mean, he must have, right?” He looked at both them desperately, “Right?!”

  
“He is a little dense.” Jack offered, almost immediately wincing from the sharp kick Davey delivered to his ankle- apparently growing up with a twin taught you to do an insane amount of things unnoticed.

  
“This cannot be happening.” Race whispered, “Oh God.”

  
“You could talk to him.” Davey pointed out, “Tell him what you meant, apologise for not talking to him clearly, et cetera.”

  
“I’ve never heard someone say that out loud.” Race informed him, still in the same distant, horrified tone as before, “Et cetera. Who says that?”

  
“You’re changing the subject.”

  
“I know.”

  
*

  
Hotshot was in an incredibly similar position to the one Jack had been around 20 minutes previous; the only difference was that Spot, rather than locking himself in the bathroom, had chosen to pace the length of their apartment, muttering under his breathe and waving his hands angrily. He had been doing that for about 15 minutes and she was starting to get sick of it.

  
“Are you gonna snap out of it, or what?”

  
He paused, blinking at her as if he hadn’t noticed she was there, “What?”

  
“Snap out of it, Spot!”

  
“Yeah, sorry.”

  
He immediately resumed his pacing, and she resisted the urge to bang her head against a hard surface, 

  
“Spot,” she groaned, “why are you doing this?”

  
“Me and Racer went to Jacobi’s for lunch.”

  
The urge to bang her head against a hard surface and not stop until everything stopped, “You do that every week.”

  
“Yeah, yeah I know that.”

  
Hotshot gritted her teeth- this was her best friend, and he was obviously struggling with something, so she was going to help him through this and not yell at him. She let out a calming breathe. “Then what’s the fucking problem?”

  
“He told me he had a boyfriend.”

  
“If you keep only telling me half pieces of information, I’m gonna hurt you.”

  
“Alright, alright! He told me he liked having a boyfriend, and I was upset because I’m a little bit in love with him and we hooked up at Jack’s last party and I thought that might mean something, but I’m a good friend and I wanted to be supportive, so I asked him who he was seeing and he just left and I couldn’t go after him because neither of us had paid, so I paid and then I was gonna go after him, but he and Jack moved in together and I don’t have his new address yet so I can’t and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  
“Jesus Christ.” She muttered, slightly overwhelmed with information. “When I said stop giving me half bits, I didn’t mean dump all of it out.”

  
“I don’t know what to do, Niamh.”

  
“Alright, ok, we, uh, we should probably deal with that slowly.”

  
He was looking at her the way he had used to when they were still two kids in an abusive foster home, and she had taken on the role of his older sister. “Ok.”

  
“What do you mean you hooked up at Jack’s last party.”

  
His face went red, “I didn’t mean to say that bit.”

  
“Yeah, I guessed. Explain.”

  
“Explain what, Niamh? You know how it works.”

  
“Don’t get snappy with me, Sean.”

  
He leaned back into the couch, “Sorry.”

  
She ran a hand over her face, running back over his little info-dump in her head, “You’re in love with him?”

  
“Yeah…”

  
“Why?”

  
“Why?”

  
She hadn’t meant to ask that; she had just never even understood how the two of them had become friends- they had almost nothing in common from what she had seen- and was therefore utterly thrown by his deceleration of love. “I don’t know, Sean.”

  
“He’s so kind.” Spot whispered, “he’s so nice to everyone, and he smiles at people on the streets, and the kids at his dance studio all adore him, and he always makes time to talk to them if we see them in public. He always makes sure that Davey has time to chill at Jack’s parties ‘cos otherwise he would spend the whole time worrying, and he dances so prettily.”

  
“Huh.”

  
He sunk further into the couch- anyone else would think he was ashamed of his deceleration, of the fact that he liked another boy, but Niamh had known him long enough to know he was waiting for her validation, he wanted to know that she thought it was ok. Often, she had cursed the people who had made him crave validation for every response, but it was more important in that moment to give him the validation than to tell him he didn’t need it.

  
“I’m glad you found someone.”

  
Spot smiled up at her, just a small thing, but it was there, and then it was gone, “It doesn’t matter, though, he’s got a boyfriend.”

  
“Yeah…”

  
The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes, which was Spot’s general attention span in the quiet, “I don’t understand why he wouldn’t tell me who it was.”

  
“What do you mean?” Niamh asked, running back over that part of his monologue in her head- _so I asked him who he was seeing and he just left and I couldn’t go after him because neither of us had paid, so I paid and then I was gonna go after him, but he and Jack moved in together and I don’t have his new address yet so I can’t and I don’t know what to do about it._

  
“I mean he just left!”

  
“And how did he seem?” She asked slowly, carefully making her way towards the same conclusion Davey had reached with Race.

  
“Uh, upset, I guess? But I don’t know what he was upset about because I would never abandon him or be mad about who he’s dating so…” Spot trailed off and looked up at her again, and the expression was back.

  
“You asked who he was dating, and he seemed upset?”

  
“Yes. Are you listening?”

  
“And you hooked up at a party?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“And you go out to eat with Race, and just Race, every week, no matter what?”

  
“Yes, Niamh, what’s your point?”

  
“I think it’s you.”

  
“You think what’s me?” Spot demanded, and his ‘King of Brooklyn’ façade was up, concerningly since he had never felt the need to be emotionless around her.

  
“I think…” Hotshot explained carefully, “that Race thinks the two of you are dating.”

  
“What?”

  
“Yeah…”

  
“But he told me he had a boyfriend.”

  
“No…” Niamh corrected, “he told you he liked having a boyfriend. He said that. To you.”

  
Spot’s eyes had gone wide, “Oh no.”

  
“It’s not that bad.”

  
“It’s so bad, Niamh! He probably thinks I was rejecting him or something!”

  
Niamh didn’t know Race that well, but if he was a true match for Spot, he probably did jump to a conclusion that stupid. She neglected to point that out, instead grimacing sympathetically, and watching him as he jumped back up and resumed the pacing he had been doing previously- she couldn’t even bring herself to criticise him this time. “You could talk to him?”

  
“I don’t know where he lives, Niamh! How am I supposed to do that?” Spot was waving his hands frantically, “He probably hates me!”

  
“Spot! You have a phone!”

  
He froze, halfway through another step, hands up in the air where they had been when he suddenly stopped. She was half tempted to pretend to reset him, but that would probably be insensitive considering his panic.

  
“My phone.” He finally whispered and dove across the room to grab it. “What do I sa- hey!”

  
Niamh snatched the phone out of his hands, helpfully already unlocked and pulled up Race’s contact- the only contact in his phone with an emoji after it. 

  
“What are you gonna say?”

  
“Hey, I think I might have misunderstood you earlier, can we talk please?” she spoke as she typed it out, “That ok?”

  
“I-uh yeah.”

  
“Good.” She hit send and they both stared at the screen. “Maybe we should do something else for a while?”

  
“Yeah…”

  
*

  
Back at Jack and Race’s, the three of them were trying to come up with some sort of plan. Davey kept shooting down most of what they came up with- most notably ‘kill him.’ ‘avoid him.’ ‘seduce him.’- and was starting to look slightly done.

  
“Oh my God!” Race suddenly shouted, holding his phone out at arm’s length, “He texted me!”

  
Jack and Race politely ignored Davey’s “Thank God,” instead choosing to read the text several times,

  
“Huh,” Jack said, “I think Davey was right.”

  
The boy in question leaned over the shoulder that Jack was not reading over and glanced over the message. “Yeah. I think Spot might be on the same page as us now.”  
“So, what do I do?” Race asked, looking up at him hopefully.

  
“…Text him back?”

  
“Yeah, yeah, uh I’ll ask him to come here? Or should we go somewhere else?”

  
“The park.” Davey suggested, “It’s kind of neutral ground.”

  
“You’re a genius!” Race informed him, typing fast enough that his fingers were almost a blur, “If you didn’t like Jack and I didn’t like Spot I would absolutely date you!”

  
“Thanks…”

  
“He responded! He said yes! I’m leaving!”

  
“Please put on shoes and a coat!” Davey cried as he made a break for the door with neither of those things.

  
“Yeah, yeah, ok.” Shoes and coat in place, Race gave them a cursory wave and sprinted out the door, slamming it shut behind him.

  
“I am so glad that crisis is over.” Davey sighed, sinking back down on the couch, “And I am now going to sleep for three years.”

  
Jack laughed and ran a gentle hand through his boyfriend’s hair, “You do that.”

  
*

  
Nobody ever actually found out how the conversation between Race and Spot in the park went, but they did announce that they were officially dating- and kinda had been for three months- in the groupchat later that day. Hotshot and Davey also received some nice socks a few days later, supposedly from an anonymous donator, but the ‘thanks for your help with Race/Spot’ respectively did kind of make the lack of signature pointless.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway i wrote this while I should have been doing English work, but I didn't   
> I have a poem to annotate & part of my coursework to do but uhhhhhhh here have this what do u think.
> 
> I wonder what my English teacher would think


End file.
